November 27, 2005
Governing the Internet
From Economic and Political Weekly, a case for reforming the governance structure of the internet.
The US and the European Union are in the midst of another spat – this time on internet governance. The dispute is important enough to be raised by president Bush with the European Commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso. It has been the subject of newspaper editorials on both sides of the Atlantic and, lately even here in India. The main sources of contention are the present role of the US government, the possible role of other governments and intergovernmental organisations and whether any governmental oversight is needed.
It all started at Geneva in December 2003 at the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At that time the dispute was mainly between the developing countries and the OECD bloc. It could not be resolved and a multi-stakeholder working group was set up under the chairmanship of Nitin Desai, the former CEA and UN under-secretary general, who is now India-based but continues to be the UN’s special adviser for the Information Summit. The issue is supposed to be resolved at the second phase of the summit that is to be held at Tunis from November 16 to 18.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:00 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Well, it seems like a whole lot of handwaving- the only paragraph in the whole article that remotely addressed the need for change was at the end; and it was logically inconsistent.
The author says that the case for leaving the system intact is that it has worked well, and led to growth in new technologies. The author says that the case for giving up the US's light hand is that it's become too important to the world's economy- in a single conclusion paragraph, unsubstantiated by anything that went before it.
The internet is important. Entering domain names in western character sets in non-western locales must be tedious and awful. That doesn't justify UN involvement in whether or not a domain name should be registered (can you imagine China's reaction to the .tw CCTLD?). That suggests technical work to migrate DNS to Unicode- a tricky project, as domains can be easily faked with alternate character sets, which will lead to significant phishing and fraud problems.
It was ironic that the Tunisian summit was marred with intrusive government security, aggressive policing, and that the Tunisian authorities blocked many of the sites run by the NGO's participating in the conference- see the Register: http://forms.theregister.co.uk/search/?q=Tunis
Posted by: Tim Howland | Nov 27, 2005 10:40:41 PM
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